All you need are a few million buckets of rain, a few thousand hail stones, a sky that’s darker than their caps, some lightning streaks to break up the darkness …

Of course, the way things are going for the Yankees right now, there were a few thousand brave souls who actually stood under the stands while an angry summer rainstorm pounded Yankee Stadium, and there can only be one good reason why: With this team — as well as it’s playing, as well as it’s hitting — there’s no guarantee it wouldn’t have figured out a way to put a 4-spot on the board even as the tarpaulin covered the infield.

Well, we are kidding. Still, look at the pitchers’ faces. Every one of them. Look at the way Josh Beckett and Jon Lester talked to themselves on the mound at Fenway a few weeks ago, reduced to grinding ham-and-eggers.

Look at the terrified expression Blue Jays’ reliever Jason Frasor wore Monday night as he pondered having to throw a 3-and-1 pitch to Raul Ibanez with the bases juiced in an eighth-inning tie. Frasor had just made Nick Swisher’s knees buckle with one of the best full-count curveballs you’ll ever see and still it seemed he couldn’t bring himself to throw the ball to Ibanez.

With good reason, as it turned out. Ibanez’s grand slam all but ended it.

Goodness, look at Ricky Romero, yesterday’s starter for the Jays. Now, Romero is having a rough year — he had a fat 5.05 ERA heading into yesterday — but before the bottom of the first inning was three batters old, the Yankees had a 3-0 lead. It was 4-0 by the end. And Romero looked like those cartoon boxers look just after the punch lands, just before the tweeting birds start circling their head.

“There really isn’t an easy out in our lineup,” Swisher said after this rain-shortened 6-0 throttling of the Jays was done. “And it doesn’t matter what lineup we have out there lately.”

Lately? They’ve scored at least three runs in 42 straight games. They’ve scored at least five in 10 straight. Yesterday they rested Curtis Granderson and never missed him, the way they never miss anybody who is given a day off to catch a breather, rest weary legs and let the swelling in their hands die down from all the bludgeonings they commit with them.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Dewayne Wise said, “let alone been a part of anything like it. Not even close.”

But he is a part of it. These past six weeks have featured a whole lot of Dewayne Wise, a whole lot of Jayson Nix, a whole lot of Eric Chavez. Andruw Jones is playing like it’s 1999. Even at a time when Russell Martin can’t shove himself above the Mendoza Line, when Alex Rodriguez endures one humbling at-bat after another, it doesn’t matter.

“We’ve jumped on people early. We’ve come from behind late in games. We’ve tacked on [runs when we need them],” manager Joe Girardi said, shaking his head, marveling at the power in his pen, the one that can write out any lineup card he wants and hand his starting pitcher a barrel of runs. “We’re just playing really, really well.”

They are 36-13 across their past 49, and that’s .735 ball in any league, and enough of that damage has come against winning teams that not only do you not have to worry about the legitimacy of those numbers, you can easily ponder what it might be like as they pillage and plunder their way through Oakland and Seattle across the next seven days.

What they are doing, thanks to their bats, thanks to the way they rumble through series now, is making certain they won’t have to take part in this season’s Grand Experiment, those one-game crapshoots that will spit out wild-card representatives. Win your division, you won’t have to worry about dallying with that.

And as they boarded their plane west, they did so safe in the knowledge that they were 10 games clear of anyone else in the AL East. Good baseball. Good strategy. Let everyone else muck it up for the right to endure nine hellacious innings the day after the season ends. The Yankees will enjoy it just as much watching the game on TV, thank you very much.